What Aging Takes and What It Gives: Rereading Tuesdays with Morrie through Gender and Lived Experience

Author: Moka Iinuma

Third-year student at Sophia University

Publication permission was granted in February 2026

*

What Aging Takes and What It Gives: 

Rereading Tuesdays with Morrie through Gender and Lived Experience

“Lately, we talk about aging every day during lunch,” my mother said with a small laugh. She spoke about sudden shoulder pain, the beginning of presbyopia, and the wrinkles and spots she notices each time she looks in the mirror. Later that same day, I asked my father the same question about aging. After a brief pause, he replied, “I don’t really talk about it that much.” Both of my parents are forty-four years old and live in the same household, but they experience aging in strikingly different ways. For my mother, aging is closely tied to physical discomfort and visible changes in appearance, which sometimes produce feelings of insecurity and comparison. For my father, aging is framed more as a decline in physical ability that can be compensated for through experience and skill, rather than as a threat to his sense of self. This contrast led me to question whether aging is truly a universal experience, or whether its meaning is shaped by gender, social expectations, and lived experience.

Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie presents aging not simply as decay but as a process of growth. As Morrie’s body weakens, his emotional depth, wisdom, and sense of purpose appear to expand. The book offers a counterpoint to a youth-centered culture by suggesting that life can become more meaningful with age. However, when I read alongside my parents’ contrasting perspectives, Morrie’s philosophy raises a question. Can aging always be understood as growth, or does that interpretation depend on whose body and whose life is aging?

How we understand aging matters because it shapes how we value ourselves and others long before old age actually arrives. If aging is understood primarily as loss, especially for women, whose worth is often tied to youth and appearance, it can generate fear, insecurity, and silence rather than acceptance or growth. This essay examines the theme of aging in Tuesdays with Morrie through a conversation with my parents, focusing on how gendered experiences shape the way aging is felt, discussed, and valued. By placing Morrie’s ideas in dialogue with lived experience and scholarly research, this paper explores both the promise and the limitations of viewing aging as a positive transformation.

To begin, when examined alongside my conversation with my mother, Morrie’s worldview both resonates and reveals its limitations. My mother spoke openly and repeatedly about aging, focusing on physical pain, declining eyesight, and visible changes such as wrinkles and spots. In this sense, her awareness of bodily change aligns with Morrie’s acknowledgment of physical decay. However, unlike Morrie, she does not frame these changes as opportunities for growth. Instead, her comments were often accompanied by anxiety and comparison, suggesting that aging threatens her sense of self rather than deepening it. This divergence highlights a dimension that Morrie’s philosophy does not fully capture: the gendered pressure placed on women to maintain youth and physical attractiveness. My mother’s lived experience teaches that aging is not only a personal and internal process but also a socially evaluated one, shaped by cultural expectations that link women’s value to appearance. Listening to my mother forced me to reread Morrie more critically. As a young woman, I could already recognize myself in her anxieties about appearance. Her experience felt more like a preview of a future I am likely to inhabit.

By contrast, my father’s perspective more closely aligns with Morrie’s emphasis on experience over physical ability. He spoke less frequently about aging and framed it primarily as a decline in physical strength that could be compensated for through skill, knowledge, and efficiency. Like Morrie, he appeared to accept bodily limitations without attaching them to a loss of identity. His relative silence also marks a significant divergence. Whereas Morrie openly articulates fear, envy, and acceptance, my father’s restraint reflects a cultural tendency for men to endure aging quietly rather than openly articulating vulnerability. His experience suggests that acceptance may sometimes take the form of minimization, refusing to center it emotionally.

Together, these conversations reveal that Morrie’s philosophy assumes a degree of autonomy over meaning that is not equally available to everyone. Morrie’s ability to embrace aging is shaped by his position as an older man whose worth is not socially dependent on youth or physical beauty. My parents’ experiences demonstrate that aging is not merely an individual journey toward growth, but a socially mediated process influenced by gender, cultural norms, and life circumstances.

In Tuesdays with Morrie, on the fourth Tuesday, Morrie states that “Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live” (Albom 82). By linking death and life in this way, he suggests that accepting death is not the end, but a way to live more meaningfully, which is an idea that the book develops and complicates in later Tuesday visits as Morrie confronts the realities of physical decline.

On the seventh Tuesday, Mitch constructs aging as a paradoxical process in which loss and growth coexist. One of the clearest articulations of this idea appears when Morrie declares that “Aging is not just decay. . . It’s growth” (Albom 118). The language is deliberately corrective. The phrase “not just” signals a resistance to dominant cultural narratives that equate aging solely with deterioration. Structurally, this conversation appears around the middle of the book, but functions as a philosophical foundation that subsequent Tuesday visits repeatedly return to.

This tension becomes more visible in Morrie’s admission of envy toward younger bodies. Although he advocates detachment, Morrie confesses that “I envy them [younger, healthier people] being able to go to the health club, or go for a swim. Or dance” (Albom 119). Mitch’s choice to include this confession complicates Morrie’s philosophy. Aging is not portrayed as a serene state of wisdom but as an ongoing negotiation between desire and acceptance, which requires repeated and conscious effort.

A recurring pattern across the Tuesday conversations is Morrie’s rejection of age as a competitive category. His statement that “age is not a competitive issue” emphasizes that each stage of life has its own value (Albom 120). Mitch reinforces this idea through Morrie’s metaphor of containing “every age” within oneself (Albom 120), which allows aging to be understood as integration rather than replacement.

However, when I read alongside my parents’ perspectives, Morrie’s philosophy reveals a notable absence. While Morrie speaks as though aging can be universally embraced through mindset and meaning, the text largely ignores how social factors, particularly gender, shape the experience of growing older. Although Morrie’s body is visibly deteriorating, it is not socially scrutinized in the way women’s bodies often are. Mitch’s narrative focuses on physical dependency and mortality, but it does not address appearance-based self-worth or cultural expectations surrounding youth. This silence suggests that Morrie’s optimistic framing of aging may be enabled by his position as an older man, whose value is not primarily tied to physical attractiveness. While I admired his belief that aging is growth, I began to notice how easily his philosophy separates inner worth from physical appearance. My mother’s experience made that separation feel fragile.

Moreover, scholarly research complicates Morrie’s philosophy by revealing how social structures shape what aging feels like and what it is allowed to mean. At first, Laura L. Carstensen’s Socioemotional Selectivity Theory offers one psychological framework for understanding Morrie’s orientation toward aging. Carstensen argues that “As time horizons grow more limited—as they typically do with age—goals change in ways that lead to preferences to spend time with close social partners. . . and the selective deployment of cognitive resources to process positive information” (1194). This shift helps explain Morrie’s focus on love, conversation, and presence rather than productivity. It also resonates with my mother’s remark that aging has expanded her perspective and made life feel more enjoyable despite physical discomfort, which made me more receptive to Morrie’s emphasis on emotional growth rather than productivity.

However, Susan Sontag’s essay “The Double Standard of Aging” complicates this narrative by exposing the gendered asymmetry embedded in experiences of growing old. Sontag argues that “for most women, aging means [a] humiliating process of gradual sexual disqualification...women are considered maximally eligible in early youth” (287). She also explains that “getting older tends (for several decades) to operate in men’s favor, since their value as lovers and husbands is set more by what they do than how they look” (Sontag 287). This framework clarifies why my mother’s experience of aging is inseparable from anxiety about appearance, whereas my father views aging largely in terms of declining physical ability that can be compensated for by experience. Reading Morrie through Sontag made me realize how much his philosophy depends on a cultural permission that women are rarely granted.

This structural dimension becomes more explicit in “Aging: A Feminist Issue” by Leni Marshall. Quoting Barbara MacDonald, Marshall challenges feminists to recognize that “ageism is a central feminist issue” (vii). The text further demonstrates how aging disproportionately harms women through poverty and isolation, noting that 41 percent of elderly women in the United States live alone and that elderly women living alone, especially women of color, experience dramatically higher poverty rates (Marshall vii–viii). These realities reveal that aging operates not only at the level of identity but also through economic vulnerability and social marginalization. 

Taken together, these three frameworks reveal aging as a multidimensional experience shaped by psychology, gender ideology, and structural inequality. Carstensen explains why aging may bring emotional depth. Sontag exposes how women’s aging is socially devalued. In addition, Marshall demonstrates that ageism is embedded in economic and institutional realities. When I read alongside Morrie’s philosophy and my parents’ narratives, these theories suggest that aging is a deeply uneven process, in which emotional growth coexists with gendered stigma and structural vulnerability. I found myself resisting Sontag’s and Marshall’s arguments at first, not because they were unconvincing, but because they made aging feel less controllable. I wanted to believe that attitude alone could determine how one experiences aging. Reading these feminist critiques forced me to confront the limits of that belief. Morrie is not wrong, but now his philosophy feels incomplete when I think about how aging actually works in the real world.

Through this process, I learned that my understanding of aging had been shaped by seeing it as something philosophical rather than lived. Aging is growth, but it is also loss. It can bring wisdom, but it can also magnify insecurity. Recognizing this complexity did not diminish Morrie’s message for me. Instead, it grounded it in lived reality.

Through reading Tuesdays with Morrie, speaking with my parents, and engaging with scholarly research, I have come to understand aging not as a single and universal experience, but as a layered process shaped by culture, gender, body, and time. Aging is neither simply decline nor guaranteed growth. It is an ongoing negotiation between what the body loses, what experience grants, and what society allows individuals to carry forward with dignity. Morrie’s belief that aging is growth remains compelling, but on its own, it no longer feels sufficient. The conversations with my parents revealed that the ability to embrace aging is not evenly distributed, and research confirmed that social structures profoundly influence how aging is felt and valued. In this sense, aging is a matter of recognition of whose aging is honored as wisdom and whose is scrutinized as loss.

What remains unresolved is whether a culture invested in youth can genuinely make space for aging without demanding compensation or concealment. Morrie suggests that meaning frees us from regret, but research suggests that meaning must coexist with structural inequality rather than erase it. Ultimately, this process shifted my understanding of aging from something to fear or idealize into something to interpret continuously. Aging is not a destination, but a perspective that begins forming long before the body visibly changes. Learning to recognize its complexity may be the first step toward living more honestly.

Works Cited

Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays with Morrie. Crown, 1997.

Carstensen, Laura L. “Socioemotional Selectivity Theory: The Role of Perceived Endings in Human Motivation.” The Gerontologist, vol. 61, no. 8, 2021, pp. 1188-1196.

Marshall, Leni. “Aging: A Feminist Issue.” NWSA Journal, vol. 18, no. 1, 2006, pp. vii–xiii. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4317180. Accessed 23 Jan. 2026.

Sontag, Susan. “The Double Standard of Aging.” The Saturday Review, 1972, pp. 285- 294.